Eugene Bullard

Eugene Jacques Bullard was born on the ninth of October 1895 at Columbus, Georgia, the seventh of ten children of William Octave Bullard — a Haitian-Martinican stevedore and railway labourer of the Columbus cotton mills — and Josephine Yokalee Thomas, a Creek Nation member. He was raised in the rural Black-Creek household at Columbus and at the Brown plantation at Stewart County, Georgia.

He witnessed at eight in 1903 the attempted lynching of his father at the Columbus city centre — the father survived the attempted lynching only by escaping through a back alley of the Columbus Stewart Mercantile yard — and resolved at eight to leave the United States for France, where his father had told him that no racial-caste system equivalent to the American Jim Crow existed.

He ran away from home at eleven in 1906 and worked as a stable hand at the Robert Turner racing-horse stables at Dawson, Georgia and the Atlanta race track for the following three years. He stowed away aboard the German freighter Marta Russ at Norfolk, Virginia in March 1912 at sixteen and arrived at Aberdeen, Scotland in April 1912.

He worked the United Kingdom music-hall circuit between 1912 and 1914 as a slack-rope acrobat, a vaudeville actor, and a featherweight prize-fighter at the National Sporting Club of London. He crossed to Paris in March 1914 on the European boxing circuit and was at Paris at the outbreak of the European war of August 1914.

He enlisted on the twenty-third of October 1914 in the French Foreign Legion at Paris — by a one-year false-papers age declaration — and served the Foreign Legion in the trenches at the Champagne and the Marne offensives of 1915. He was wounded at Verdun on the fifth of March 1916 by a German artillery shell that destroyed his left thigh muscle — a wound from which he received the Croix de Guerre on the third of July 1917 and the rank of caporal.

He was transferred at the close of the Verdun convalescence to the French Aéronautique Militaire and was admitted in October 1916 at the École de Pilotage at Tours for flight instruction. He was issued the French military pilot’s licence number 6,950 on the fifth of May 1917 — the first Black combat aviator in any air force in the world.

He flew across the spring and summer of 1917 with the Lafayette Flying Corps escadrille N 93 and SPA 85 at the Champagne front — credited with one and possibly two confirmed enemy-aircraft victories — and was the only Black member of the Lafayette Flying Corps. He was grounded in November 1917 at the request of the American Air Service after the United States entered the European war, the American Service refusing to accept Black aviators into its expeditionary forces.

He returned to enlisted French Foreign Legion infantry duty through to the Armistice of November 1918, and was awarded the Légion d’honneur in May 1959.

He died at New York on the twelfth of October 1961 of complications of stomach cancer, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the first Black combat aviator.